Avaya-Zang: New Cloud Services 'Far More' Than Twilio, RingCentral, 8x8

AVAYA ENGAGE — While working through its chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, Avaya is building its cloud communications portfolio with two new offerings via its subsidiary, Zang.

During Monday’s Avaya Engage in Las Vegas, Zang launched Zang Office and Zang Spaces. Brian Dingwall, senior product manager for all of Zang’s apps portfolio, said both services provide new revenue opportunities for partners.

Lee Ho, Avaya’s head of digital marketing, said there’s “more depth” to what Zang is doing in terms of communication and collaboration, “and far more than what other vendors have today, whether you’re thinking about Twilio or RingCentral, or 8×8.”

Zang Office is a cloud-based business phone service with features like interactive voice response (IVR), voicemail with voicemail-to-email translation and landline-to-mobile transfer, caller ID, extension dialing and more from any extension or any device.{ad}

Zang Spaces is a cloud-based persistent team collaboration and meeting offering that integrates voice, video, tasks, sharing and more into one application that can be accessed from any browser with no downloading required.

“We did our first product launch with Zang last March and that was our Zang Cloud service, and that was our entrance into the cloud communications space” Dingwall said. “So the leader in that space is Twilio and with Zang Cloud, we’re really looking to compete and address that market. With the launch of Zang Office, we’re entering the cloud PBX markets.”

For Avaya partners, Zang Office and Zang Spaces are launching with a referral and sales agent program, he said.

“So the referral program is really just about, if you have a lead for Zang Office or Zang Spaces, in essence you can track that lead and if the purchase goes through, you’ll be provided with compensation,” Dingwall said. “The sales agent model … will allow partners to be able to resell the solution at a higher compensation rate, but they will be taking on sort of that first level of support and customer success, so being able to configure the solutions to the customer’s needs, guide them and educate them, as well as provide first-level phone support for the Zang solution. So there is a marginal amount of training required, but that is an opportunity for the channel partners, and that’s sort of our first iteration of the Zang partner program that we’ll be watching.”